That doesn't mean they can't be funded otherwise, or that they need to be of the quality you have in mind. Consider: — Leontiskos

Well, they are not, and that's not going away soon, anymore than my ideas are going to be adopted soon. The government finances the infrastructure for your "private" cars. That is just a fact of our times.

A dirt road where I live handles pedestrians, bikers, horses, ATVs, carriages, motorcycles, cars, RV's, and buses. One time I even saw a Ferrari (on the paved road, admittedly)!

And when the cheaper system of roads breaks down because society hits a depression, it is still serviceable to a large extent. The quality of the roads diminishes at that point, but the transportation system doesn't collapse as it would with a rail system. — Leontiskos

Well, then let me list you all the stuff from the OP that goes along with automobiles.

His system wouldn't work by itself -- it would need too large a number of cars to handle peak traffic. For peak travel times, buses and trains would move large volumes of travelers. — BC

Sounds like an interesting first step. It's more ideas like these that are needed. But no one is going to give up the ease of "just" (there is a lot that actually goes into "just") driving to get to their friends or family or business or recreation or whatever other private activity one desires.

What makes Boston's system good, or even the Twin Cities' system good when it is good, is enough buses on a given route to offer frequent service, and then good interconnections with rail or other buses. Covid 19 fucked things up for transit systems across the country. Just now things are getting back to normal, but not quite up to 2019 levels.

Bus Rapid Transit lines run as frequently as every 8 minutes. which gives them good connectivity with other parts of the system. Some of the lines are 10 miles long or longer.

I have had a lot of negative experiences with buses over the last 50 years -- like long waits and slow travel times, or not knowing when in hell the bus was supposed to arrive. If you didn't have a printed schedule, you were sol. That has been solved by a text system for finding out when the next bus is scheduled to arrive. — BC

I'm not keen on busses. They are better than nothing, but they seem inefficient and slow except for small connections.

But they're not, because roads are cheap enough to be built by private parties. — Leontiskos

That is false.. depending on the country I guess. Most roads are funded by state, local, and federal taxes.

The problem isn't merely economic, although the cost of trains is certainly prohibitive to private parties. The problem is that in order to go anywhere I am at the whim of your centralized thought-child. What you have in mind is centralized, government control of the mobility of the entire nation. — Leontiskos

I just think you overlook that roads are simply a hodgepodge version of the same thing.

...It's like we're groping in the dark for the concept of a bus. — Leontiskos

Dynamic trains can probably do that.. I made that up. But sounds like it's possible.

Taxes, banking, security, etc.? They apply to everything, not just cars. — Leontiskos

The kind of taxes, banking, and security that go to public transit, or even a private company is not the same as incurred when owning a car. Less time, stress, loans necessary when spread out across a community in the form of X (non property/car tax... from a general fund whether it be sales, house, income, or any of the other usual ones that are used for various public works). In other words, I don't mind it being taken from a progressive tax base rather than personally from my bank account. This is evil sounding to conservative politics, so go on trying to show the downsides...

And I think the big elephant in the room is autonomy and subsidiarity. You have conceived of mobility as tied inextricably to the State within a centralized, top-down system. — Leontiskos

I don't mind fees to a private company to maintain it. Besides, do you think that "public" is really just "public"? It's always been public contracted to private with public and sometimes combined with private funds. Everyone gets their cut. You can have your Ayn Randian proprietors and shareholders ripping people off or the government getting their share, I guess.

Just for example, I live 3 miles from the University of Minnesota where I have worked and where I get medical and dental care. It takes me about 50 minutes to travel that distance on a bus (with good connections). It takes about an hour to walk. It takes about 20 minutes to bike. 50 minutes is too long for the distance, but there are no direct busses to the U from where I live. If a bus is missed, automatically add 12 to 30 minutes to the time. — BC

Yes, I understand the infrequency and inefficiency of today's public transit.

I also think AI trains might be the best model, not AI cars. Imagine if roads had smaller trains that stopped at each house or what not with some conductors helping the elderly and disabled.

You said here:

This sounds so much better than having my car available anytime, and easily drivable to the Walmart about three miles away. Much better to wait for the neighborhood train. — jgill

Man, after a long day, I wouldn't mind just sitting and letting the local transit take me to my location with ease and not having to deal with driving. So the convenience can go either way.

Damn. I get blamed for everything. — jgill

Cars represent a kind of freedom, but it has had its consequences, which aren't great either. As @BC well-stated:

The truth is, we missed the boat a century ago. We dismissed trains and we staked our future on autos, trucks and highways. Yes, it was a bad idea. — BC

This sounds so much better than having my car available anytime, and easily drivable to the Walmart about three miles away. Much better to wait for the neighborhood train. — jgill

Just more frequent trains. And yes, your objection represents the common view now. Intractable. At the end of the day if Trump gets elected it’s only the fault of the electorate. If trains don’t gain traction (pun intended), it starts with the consumer.

In a perfect world, there’d be tons of train cars. Maybe there be a reservation component. Either way, it would be integrated with everything and planned into the city.

Some corners of Europe are already a bit like that, though you can still own a car anyway. Amsterdam comes to mind. If I recall correctly, in some areas they have bikes and trams, but no cars.
Prague's public transport system is mindblowingly good. — Lionino

Yes, Europe definitely has a better transportation system due to the population density, smaller areas/ closer cities, smaller space for automobiles, preservation of the character of older areas, more emphasis on public works, and generally favorable green policies, when compared to the US federal spending (though this is also more dependent on state governments. California might be more "green", it also has a negative migration rate due to various overregulations amongst other things. Los Angeles is too spread out for trains to be a real option. San Francisco has a better system.. NYC, DC, and Boston tend to be better because of built-in public transit from an earlier time).

Somewhat anthropocentrically you have omitted to mention the vast numbers of animals killed by automobiles—estimated to be 350.000.000 per year in the United States alone. — Janus

Yep, add it to the (growing) list. Do not take it as "exhaust"ive (pun intended).

With all this bs in mind, I am looking for some objections. Does anybody know of a philosopher or philosophical project/ question that is more interesting or important? Who addresses the above issues better than Neitzsche? Or alternatively, do you think that I just have a bad outlook and want to take issue with any of my opinions in the bullet points? — SatmBopd

Schopenhauer. Nietzsche tried to turn his one-time teacher on his head (Will-to-live becomes Will-to-power).. Compassion and asceticism become "Master morality over slave morality", and the like. A renouncing of life to a re-affirming of life with all its suffering for eternity.

I think just because a philosopher came later, doesn't mean they "perfected" or "corrected" a previous philosopher, simply because they came later. Nietzsche goes hand-in-hand with individual self-involvement, and so it resonates with the modern man's sensibilities. No wonder he is praised all over this forum and in some other circles...The Randian businessman capitalist, the punk-bohemian, the travelling dilettante, and the dictator can all claim to be an ubermensch and draw from the same well.

But the notion that humans face a special kind of suffering leaves me cold. People eat another chicken for dinner that has been, out of sight, tortured throughout its short helpless life and, between chews, talk to each other about their profound suffering. They exchange messages on phones made by forced labour that they don't worry about, using rare metals whose mining causes great individual suffering and political strife where it is mined. They talk about wars in other places that their leaders are financing and arming where children die daily. If there is a calculus of suffering, the older I've got, the less I've come to count a generalised human anguish as important - though I still, myself, feel it - paradox remains. — mcdoodle

I mean, that whole paragraph provides great examples of the ways that humans uniquely suffer.

I know this Schopenhauer quote well. But does it stand up to scrutiny? Is there an evidential basis for it? A priori I would have thought it more likely that the opposite holds: that intelligence enables a greater understanding of one's pain, which might in turn mitigate its emotional effects. Over the centuries, many generals and industrialists have justified the sufferings of their soldiery and workforces with this sort of view - as humans have in inflicting pain on the animals they kill for food and pleasure. — mcdoodle

I'm sure @Tom Storm can present his interpretation, but it seems that with the added faculties in humans, there is more heightened awareness and an increase in phenomena of the complexities and challenges of life with all sorts of issues related to societal, personal, and existential struggles related to "being a person with self-awareness of oneself in the world with other people". So there is an added emotional component and awareness of that component on top of the immediate "pain" or "suffering" that might be felt by other animals.

With this comes more deep analysis which leads to stress and anxiety regarding one's immediate situation, how one handled things in the past, and how one is to handle future pain. Animals seem to be more in the present. The deliberative aspect being less self-aware (in the human sense). So while there might be "planning", it doesn't manifest in the self-conscious and degrees of self-knowledge as humans. This brings about its angst.

Existential and value-laden problems such as the meaning, purpose, ideas of responsibility, indecision, knowing one's mortality, and choosing one's morality, brings with it a heavy dose of anxiety and suffering.

Knowing one has desires that are unfulfilled, and the possibility of dwelling on that, or knowing one has missed those goals, or worrying one might not obtain them, or added personal and social pressures of being a self-aware animal.

There are a whole plethora of uniquely human aspects to suffering that other animals seem to not have to contend with. Even just physical pain- the fact that on top of the pain is our awareness of the pain.. Our internalization of our situation as we are going through it. "I want this to stop", "Why is this happening to me?". "This sucks!".

I hopefully do not have to exhaust every aspect for how human ability for self-awareness can lead to greater suffering. With greater amounts of complexity brings greater amounts of emotional baggage- boredom, tedium, sadness, and yes, even happiness. The extremes become heightened as one hangs onto an idea of past, present, and future, and a self, and one's own ideas of one's preferences, and society, and ones psyche in the world at large.

The idea that we have a greater capacity to mitigate pain doesn't seem to negate the fact that we wouldn't need to mitigate the pain if we didn't have this awareness in the first place, so it seems to cancel out, or be a red herring to the problem at hand. It brings up notions too of if it is better not to suffer than to have to suffer and figure out ways around suffering that exists in the first place.

Most "established" industries and companies do this. If staying the same gives maximum profit then there is not much motivation to change. If this is what the shareholders want then then a company has an obligation to comply. — Agree-to-Disagree

This is true.

Are you aware of what you are saying here? Where do you live? — jgill

Imagine this for almost any technology. Disbelief. A car or airplane to someone in 1789 might have seemed comically removed from reality, no? But please go on that trains to and from rural areas or at least, outer suburbs to grocery stores and cities- THIS is the one that is the most unbelievable and can never even be conceived in principle.

I guess think of parking lots in cities. Lot of space for that. Perhaps the situation was the same for horse and buggy. More trains might need space unless it’s a subway. Trying to cover bases as to the externalities. Some are more impactful than others. But many roads did not take this amount of asphalt and concrete as ones used for automobiles. It’s no doubt more roads and material are needed to support the tons of steel.

I’d not be advocating horse again but public transit in the form of some kind of train system or cable cars.

Like most things in life automobiles have their good points and their bad points. — Agree-to-Disagree

The good points are known. They make things flexible. How much of the car industry and ancillary industries insulated itself from any substantial change to industry?

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9118199/public-transportation-subway-buses

More analysis of the situation.

But wouldn't it be great if these cars were just showpieces and not the norm. Yes, the "freedom". Wave the flag, feel the gear shift (if one is inclined towards a standard versus an automatic).. One can keep their car enthusiasm and still be for a better transportation framework.

Ha, there are a lot one can choose from. I'll allow it :razz:.

one of them got a car he inherited from his granny (hence, the grannymobile). An ancient English ‘Wolseley’ — Wayfarer

The old English cars.. Rolls Royce being the standard. Jaguars etc.

don’t overlook the transition to electric vehicles — Wayfarer

Well you don't have to feel too bad with your gas car purchase. This is where I must give the obligatory response to electric cars: "The cobalt and other parts bring with it other problems, along with the disposal of the electrical components".

Yeah, I mean, as I said I get that cars aren't going any time soon. It would take a change in how we allocate money. Who do you think contracts and pays for the building and maintaining of roads? Local, county, state, and federal governments. That's who. So if you are telling me it's "practically impossible" for your "remote" location to be catered to.. guarantee there is a paid-for-by-government road leading to your small, tranquil hamlet "remote" location. That small route can easily be re-allocated to a light rail. Simply put, all money that is supposed to go to more roads simply goes to rail.

Many cities used to have built-in cable cars / tram cars and these were torn out because "people liked the convenience of cars". Don't get me wrong, I hate being around crowds, and being in the presence of my fellow man, crammed in a railway during a rush hour is one level of hell.. But that too can be alleviated by reallocation of resources to more number of trains per route.

And don't forget the need for all trucks related to things for construction.. Moving materials for housing, concrete, gravel, lumber, etc. The only thing I can think of is a sci-fi scenario where it was all done by some sort of small cable car rail transportation system that could go into small sites, etc.

It would take the will and fortitude that no government really has the capacity for.

There is a false sense that cars are part of the free market economy. Not so really. Government is intricately involved in the linking aspects of the automobile industry. Companies would lose trillions if phased out to anything that made a difference. Of course, it would simply shift into public transportation/rail construction, which of course can also be done by private companies.. but that would be a market that is not around yet. No one can crack the automobile/oil stranglehold, as it is part-and-parcel of the modern economy since the early 1900s. It is entrenched fully and inextricably. It would literally be a social revolution if everything was interconnected through various high speed rails with little use of the personal automobile.

Interesting:

https://medium.com/modern-city/how-the-united-states-ended-up-with-no-high-speed-rail-476c6209ce16

@BC might have some ideas here.

@L'éléphant @Mark Nyquist

It's an economic fight -- it would be hard to get rid of private vehicles in favor of public transport. But humans could get used to not having a garage and a vehicle. I know I can and I know people who would favor not having cars anymore. — L'éléphant

It's too big to fail. The whole world from small town to largest city, from oil rigs to gas stations. From car dealerships and banks to local mechanic. No way.

There were societies where loans are unheard of, let alone mortgage loans. Guess what? They built their own homes and did not buy a vehicle and used the public transportation instead. Look up Asian countries in the long ago past. — L'éléphant

:up: But the question is then, what are we to do now?

The production of automobiles was a result of capitalism. How to sell those cars if not enough people are wealthy enough to buy all the cars produced. Loans. Who are the people behind the production of vehicles and the invention of loans? The owners of the means of production. — L'éléphant

Ah got it. Yes, loans for all. Cars for all. Shit for all.

you can't solve the problem of automobiles without first addressing the allocation of resources where no one gets insanely wealthy while others work for minimum wage. — L'éléphant

Care to elaborate?

Sounds reasonable to me. Our reflective speculations and ruminations bring with them additional forms of suffering and dread. Many people accept that that our preference for narratives of transcendent meaning are all attempts to deal with anxiety. Our capacity for metacognitive experince enhances the pain. This observation by Schopenhauer has often resonated with me (is it from The Wisdom of Life?):

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point. — Tom Storm

I believe it is, yes.

I agree that life is a bucket of shit and that there's a menu of distractions or tools we can use to try to override the void and the suffering. — Tom Storm

And I think Zapffe lays out a wide set of them in this model here:

As adumbrated above, Zapffe arrived at two central determinations
regarding humanity’s “biological predicament.” The first was that
consciousness had overreached the point of being a sufferable property
of our species, and to minimize this problem we must minimize our
consciousness. From the many and various ways this may be done [schop1 note: acknowledgement this is simply a model, not exhaustive],
Zapffe chose to hone in on four principal strategies.
31
(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of
trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a
remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the
attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy of silence.
(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos,
we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and institutional “verities””—God,
Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of
being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.
(3) DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors,
we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant
method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands
only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets,
their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their
place in society or the universe, etc.
(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what
may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by
making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the
rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human race. Putting into
play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when
they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in
which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed
manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types
confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus
simulation of it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance.
Zapffe uses “The Last Messiah” to showcase how a literary-philosophical
composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity of trueto-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a
King Lear’s weep-
32
ing for his dead daughter Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of
the real thing.
By watchful practice of the above connivances, we may keep ourselves
from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps that
may befall us. These must come as a surprise, for if we expected them
then the conspiracy could not work its magic. Naturally, conspiracy
theories seldom pique the curiosity of “right-minded” individuals and are
met with disbelief and denial when they do. Best to immunize your
consciousness from any thoughts that are startling and dreadful so that
we can all go on conspiring to survive and reproduce as paradoxical
beings—puppets that can walk and talk all by themselves. At worst keep
your startling and dreadful thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: “None of
us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside
ourselves. Smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and
nightmares around town. Bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. And be
sure to get on with things Zombification [ schop1 note: This is Ligotti playing the optimistic interlocutor again.. to be read with heavy dose of cynicism of course ] — Ligotti, commenting on and summarizing Zapffe - CATHR

Ligotti and by extension you seem to me to be yearning for Grand Meanings. Why would there be such things? For a lifelong atheist like me these sound like the mere negation of a belief in a single god, or 'the unity of science' - some craving for an over-arching sense-making whojameflip, and a sense of grievous disappointment that it isn't to be found. — mcdoodle

I think you are WAAAY oversimplifying and too easily dismissing Ligotti here, which is a shame. It's also hard here because you don't get the whole extremely cynical way he writes. He critiques his own pessimism, yet lays into optimists/indifferentists (as you are representing the indifferent side perhaps), and yet still seems to come out with a lot of interesting ideas regarding Pessimism, despite his own understanding of your critique(s) that he has long-before predicted and has written in interlocutor form.

Perhaps there are only small meanings, built from small things: empirical discoveries in science that suggest bigger theories, striking works of art that suggest broader ways of thinking and feeling, profound personal experiences that seem to have big ramifications. — mcdoodle

Indeed his notions of sublimation discuss much to this effect (by way of Zapffe's view of it).. I quoted it up more here:

(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what
may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by
making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the
rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human race. Putting into
play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when
they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in
which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed
manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types
confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus
simulation of it — Ligotti, commenting on and summarizing Zapffe - CATHR

Out of such things it turns out that humans have a propensity to suffer, yes, and also a propensity to enjoy, and a propensity to understand and to investigate, and to know, love and hate, like and be indifferent to one another. These all emerge in the small scale and create a larger picture, often clearer to me in a Shakespeare play, say, or Beethoven, or children's art about a city, or a night of folk song, than in anything 'about' philosophy. Here I find value. — mcdoodle

I think you again, strongly discount what Ligotti lays out here. Again, hard to outline in hodgepodge posts.

With this fundamental, perhaps we can build something. If is is the case that existence is what is “good”, we can logically conclude a few points.

1. If existence is good, then more existence is better.
2. Any existence which lowers overall existence is evil. — Philosophim

Mainlander, and the Gnostics would dispute this metaphysical claim.

I'd like to also conjure, @BC and @Tom Storm and to wax brightly in the dim night of the black Locrian stage of madness.

After reading these passages, and your reflex to say, "That's just your opinion, man" bubbles up to the black miasmic surface of your thought-forms, what is value and axiology in light of pain, suffering, and the awareness thereof?

Meant to include @Wayfarer, cause why not! We can argue the "redemption" of the nihilist (Wayfarer's phrasing, which to me seems biased), versus Buddha's positive blissful repose :smile:.

In another orbit from the theologies of either Gnosticism or Catholicism,
the nineteenth-century German philosopher Philipp Mainländer (born
Phillip Batz) also envisaged non-coital existence as the surest path to
redemption for the sin of being congregants of this world. Our
extinction, however, would not be the outcome of an unnatural chastity,
but would be a naturally occurring phenomenon once we had evolved far
enough to apprehend our existence as so hopelessly pointless and
unsatisfactory that we would no longer be subject to generative
promptings. Paradoxically, this evolution toward life-sickness
35
would be promoted by a mounting happiness among us. This happiness
would be quickened by our following Mainländer’s evangelical
guidelines for achieving such things as universal justice and charity.
Only by securing every good that could be gotten in life, Mainländer
figured, could we know that they were not as good as nonexistence.
While the abolishment of human life would be sufficient for the
average pessimist, the terminal stage of Mainländer’s wishful thought
was the full summoning of a “Will-to-die” that by his deduction resided
in all matter across the universe. Mainländer diagrammed this
brainstorm, along with others as riveting, in a treatise whose title has
been translated into English as The Philosophy of Redemption(1876).
Unsurprisingly, the work never set the philosophical world ablaze.
Perhaps the author might have garnered greater celebrity if, like the
Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger in his infamous study translated
as Sex and Character (1903), he had devoted himself to gripping
ruminations on male and female matters rather than the redemptive
disappearance of everyone regardless of gender.4
As one who had a special plan for the human race, Mainländer was not
a modest thinker. “We are not everyday people,” he once wrote in the
royal third-person, “and must pay dearly for dining at the table of the
gods.” To top it off, suicide ran in his family. On the day his Philosophy
of Redemption was published, Mainländer killed himself, possibly in a
fit of megalomania but just as possibly in surrender to the extinction that
for him was so attractive and that he avouched for a most esoteric
reason—Deicide.
Mainländer was confident that the Will-to-die he believed would well
up in humanity had been spiritually grafted into us by a God who, in the
beginning, masterminded His own quietus. It seems that existence was a
horror to God. Unfortunately, God was impervious to the depredations
of time. This being so,
36
His only means to get free of Himself was by a divine form of suicide.
God’s plan to suicide himself could not work, though, as long as He
existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to
nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into nothingness, he
shattered Himself—Big Bang-like—into the time-bound fragments of
the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been
accumulating here and there for billions of years. In Mainländer’s
philosophy, “God knew that he could change from a state of superreality into non-being only through the development of a real world of
multiformity.” Employing this strategy, He excluded Himself from
being. “God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of
the world.” Once the great individuation had been initiated, the
momentum of its creator’s self-annihilation would continue until
everything became exhausted by its own existence, which for human
beings meant that the faster they learned that happiness was not as good
as they thought it would be, the happier they would be to die out.
So: The Will-to-live that Schopenhauer argued activates the world to
its torment was revised by his disciple Mainländer not only as evidence
of a tortured life within living beings,but also as a cover for a
clandestine will in all things to burn themselves out as hastily as possible
in the fires of becoming. In this light, human progress is shown to be an
ironic symptom that our downfall into extinction has been progressing
nicely, because the more things change for the better, the more they
progress toward a reliable end. And those who committed suicide, as did
Mainländer, would only be forwarding God’s blueprint for bringing an
end to His Creation. Naturally, those who replaced themselves by
procreation were of no help: “Death is succeeded by the absolute
nothing; it is the perfect annihilation of each individual in appearance
and being, supposing that by him no
37
child has been begotten or born; for otherwise the individual would live
on in that.” Mainländer’s argument that in the long run nonexistence is
superior to existence was cobbled together from his unorthodox
interpretation of Christian doctrines and from Buddhism as he
understood it. — Ligotti-CATR

As the average conscious mortal knows, Christianity and Buddhism
are all for leaving this world behind, with their leave-taking being for
destinations unknown and impossible to conceive. For Mainländer, these
destinations did not exist. His forecast was that one day our will to
survive in this life or any other will be universally extinguished by a
conscious will to die and stay dead, after the example of the Creator.
From the standpoint of Mainländer’s philosophy, Zapffe’s Last Messiah
would not be an unwelcome sage but a crowning force of the post-divine
era.Rather than resist our end, as Mainländer concludes, we will come
to see that “the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all
human wisdom.” Elsewhere the philosopher states, “Life is hell, and the
sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.”
Inhospitable to rationality as Mainländer’s cosmic scenario may seem,
it should nonetheless give pause to anyone who is keen to make sense of
the universe. Consider this: If something like God exists, or once
existed, what would He not be capable of doing, or undoing? Why
should God not want to be done with Himself because, unbeknownst to
us, suffering was the essence of His being? Why should He not have
brought forth a universe that is one great puppet show destined by Him
to be crunched or scattered until an absolute nothingness had been
established? Why should He fail to see the benefits of nonexistence, as
many of His lesser beings have? Revealed scripture there may be that
tells a different story. But that does not mean it was revealed by a
reliable narrator. Just because He asserted it was all good does not mean
he meant what He said. — CATHR- Ligotti

@Ciceronianus

Zombification
As adumbrated above, Zapffe arrived at two central determinations
regarding humanity’s “biological predicament.” The first was that
consciousness had overreached the point of being a sufferable property
of our species, and to minimize this problem we must minimize our
consciousness. From the many and various ways this may be done [schop1 note: acknowledgement this is simply a model, not exhaustive],
Zapffe chose to hone in on four principal strategies.
31
(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of
trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a
remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the
attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy of silence.
(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos,
we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God,
Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of
being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.
(3) DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors,
we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant
method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands
only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets,
their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their
place in society or the universe, etc.
(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what
may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by
making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the
rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human race. Putting into
play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when
they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in
which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed
manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types
confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus
simulation of it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance.
Zapffe uses “The Last Messiah” to showcase how a literary-philosophical
composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity of trueto-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a
King Lear’s weep-
32
ing for his dead daughter Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of
the real thing.
By watchful practice of the above connivances, we may keep ourselves
from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps that
may befall us. These must come as a surprise, for if we expected them
then the conspiracy could not work its magic. Naturally, conspiracy
theories seldom pique the curiosity of “right-minded” individuals and are
met with disbelief and denial when they do. Best to immunize your
consciousness from any thoughts that are startling and dreadful so that
we can all go on conspiring to survive and reproduce as paradoxical
beings—puppets that can walk and talk all by themselves. At worst keep
your startling and dreadful thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: “None of
us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside
ourselves. Smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and
nightmares around town. Bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. And be
sure to get on with things Zombification [ schop1 note: This is Ligotti playing the optimistic interlocutor again.. to be read with heavy dose of cynicism of course ] — Ligotti, commenting on and summarizing Zapffe - CATHR